From battle zones to coal mines and jail camps, a brand new technology of video video games helps museums deliver historical past to life and attain audiences far past their partitions.
What does battle appear like by means of the eyes of a kid? For these far faraway from battle, it may be laborious to think about. A brand new narrative journey sport, We Grew Up in Conflict, units out to reply that query by means of the tales of Mak, Anna, Valerie and Melisa.
Co-developed by Prague-based studio Charles Video games and the Conflict Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, the sport attracts on actual testimonies from youngsters who grew up in battle.
The museum, based within the aftermath of Bosnia’s 1992–95 battle, is constructing one of many world’s largest archives on wartime childhood. The establishment is a part of Websites of Conscience, a world community of organisations that confront troublesome pasts to foster dialogue.
The sport displays that work, providing a report of occasions, but additionally a window into how battle feels from a toddler’s perspective.
We Grew Up in Conflict will not be a traditional sport: there isn’t a scoring, advancing or profitable. It attracts on the true experiences of youngsters rising up in battle zones, with a deal with Bosnia and Ukraine, utilizing immersive wartime sketches to deliver their tales to life and foster empathy and consciousness amongst gamers.
This strategy is a part of a broader EU-funded analysis effort often known as MEMENTOES, the place museums, historians and sport builders discover how video video games can inform troublesome tales from the previous and attain audiences past conventional exhibitions.
They use digital actuality and different immersive strategies to make painful histories extra tangible for gamers.
“The sport will not be solely about struggling or portraying survivors as victims,” mentioned Jasminko Halilović, founder and director of the Sarajevo museum, which focuses on childhood experiences in wartime. “Additionally it is about household life, friendships, schooling, and having goals and hopes.”
A brand new technique to inform outdated tales
Museums have lengthy grappled with how you can talk complicated and infrequently traumatic histories. Via the MEMENTOES collaboration, researchers from Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Greece, Eire and the Netherlands got down to take a look at whether or not video video games might present a brand new means of reaching a wider – and youthful – viewers.
We Grew Up in Conflict is one in all a number of titles developed by the MEMENTOES crew, which introduced collectively curators, researchers and sport designers.
Mission coordinator Nikolaos Dimitriou, a senior researcher on the Centre for Analysis & Know-how Hellas (CERTH) in Thessaloniki, Greece, was a bit sceptical at first, however intrigued by the concept of interactive storytelling.
“Once I was youthful, I performed video video games only for enjoyable,” he mentioned. “In some unspecified time in the future I believed I used to be spending an excessive amount of time on them. However that is totally different. It’s like taking a historical past class, however in a extra participating means.”
Entering into the previous
Alongside We Grew Up in Conflict, the MEMENTOES crew produced two different very totally different sport experiences. One in all them, These From Under, makes use of digital actuality to revisit the 1956 mining catastrophe in Marcinelle, Belgium.
Developed with Causa Creations, alongside enter from the Le Bois du Cazier museum in Marcinelle, one other Web site of Conscience within the community, and relations of the victims, it locations gamers contained in the coal mine, confronting them with the cruel realities confronted by the miners.
One other sport, Gulag Diaries, takes gamers to Soviet-era compelled labour camps in Siberia.
It was developed by researchers on the Institute of Laptop Science of the Basis for Analysis & Know-how – Hellas (ICS-FORTH), in collaboration with Gulag.cz, a Czech-based analysis and academic initiative that paperwork the historical past of the labour camps (gulags) by means of expeditions, survivor testimonies and digital reconstructions.
Primarily based on a real-life expedition and historic information from Gulag.cz, the sport follows a researcher on a visit into the Siberian wilderness to discover the stays of a fictional Gulag, connecting gamers with the experiences of victims.
“The participant finds objects left behind by the prisoners,” mentioned Stavroula Ntoa, who led the scientific work of the venture. “Every merchandise reveals a private story, serving to gamers perceive what life was like in these camps.”
Strolling a skinny line
Utilizing video games to discover delicate historic matters comes with its personal challenges. In contrast to conventional displays, video games are interactive, and that raises questions on tone, accuracy and respect. It may be a really effective line to tread.
“What we attempt to do within the sport is similar as in our exhibitions: present how complicated these experiences are,” mentioned Halilović. However putting the correct steadiness will not be all the time straightforward.
“One of many challenges was to not ‘gamify’ the expertise an excessive amount of,” Ntoa mentioned. “The purpose wasn’t to make it enjoyable. It was to make it participating and a priceless studying expertise.”
Attaining that steadiness required shut collaboration between builders, historians and the folks whose tales impressed the video games.
“Whenever you use actual testimonies, they’re distinctive and might turn into identifiable,” Halilović defined. “We labored carefully with contributors to make sure they have been snug with how their tales have been introduced.”
Extra than simply info
The video games interact guests and produce historic injustices into focus. “Video games are a terrific software to make cultural heritage tangible, accessible and memorable to the general public,” mentioned Dimitriou.
However their actual power could lie in constructing empathy – by placing gamers in another person’s sneakers and letting them expertise occasions from the within.
“If gamers can perceive the layered penalties of battle for youngsters, we additionally hope that it helps them respect the significance of peace,” Halilović mentioned.
Early findings counsel that this strategy can have an actual affect. In some circumstances, researchers discovered that participating secondary faculty college students in We Grew Up in Conflict might change their attitudes in direction of refugees.
And the teachings discovered usually are not confined to the previous.
“These points usually are not simply historic,” Dimitriou mentioned. “Youngsters are nonetheless rising up in battle zones at present. Serving to folks relate to these experiences is essential.”
Past the museum go to
Though the analysis collaboration behind these video games wrapped up in 2025, the work is way from over. We Grew Up in Conflict is ready for wider launch, together with an academic version and a business model on the Steam online game platform.
For Halilović, the potential goes nicely past a single venture.
“Due to the sport, folks anyplace on the earth can now interact with our assortment,” he mentioned. “That was not doable earlier than.”
As museums search for new methods to attach with audiences, digital instruments have gotten more and more vital, according to efforts throughout Europe to digitise cultural heritage and make it extra extensively accessible.
Video games are beginning to play a key function in that shift, particularly once they draw on immersive applied sciences and wealthy digital archives to hold the museums’ messages into gamers’ properties and lecture rooms.
“They permit us to increase our tales past museum partitions,” Halilović mentioned. “And to succeed in individuals who may by no means in any other case stroll by means of our doorways.”
This text was initially printed in Horizon, the EU Analysis and Innovation Journal.